He Huffed and He Puffed (8 page)

Richard Bruce's insurers had screamed there was no way the ship's owner could not have been in on the plot. What a remarkable coincidence, they proclaimed sarcastically, that all this should happen just before the
Burly Girl
was due for inspection—an inspection everyone knew she couldn't pass. But after months of digging, the investigators were able to turn up no evidence to indicate that the owner had had so much as an inkling of what Captain Stone was planning. Richard Bruce was completely exonerated.

All that had been seventeen years earlier. Captain Stone had never been found, nor any other survivor of the
Burly Girl's
last voyage. All but the captain were declared legally dead after seven years had passed, even the first mate; there was no proof he had conspired with the captain, only speculation. The three ships in which Richard Bruce had invested the insurance money had done so well that eventually he was able to buy out his partners. Over the years Bruce added to his fleet whenever he could until now Bruce Shipping Lines was one of the dominant names in the overseas freight business.

That's where things stood at present. A. J. Strode had studied all the records of the investigation of the sinking of the
Burly Girl
and said to Castleberry, “Thirty-five dead sailors mean thirty-five grieving women somewhere. Find them. One of them might know something. Check the captain's and the mate's families too.”

So Myron Castleberry had sent Pierce to Los Angeles. The New York detective had hired a firm of California detectives to help him. They'd been able to track down twenty-seven of the regular crew's families, but none of them knew any more than what the records showed. Captain Stone's wife had died five years earlier, but a daughter was now living in San Diego. She was of no help, however; she'd been only ten at the time of the incident.

The first mate's widow had been located in Venice. And she knew something.

Pierce reported that the first time he tried to question her she'd grown alarmed and almost panicked. He'd gone back several times, trying to find out what she was so frightened of. The woman's name was Estelle Rankin, and she didn't want to talk about the man she'd been married to. Mrs. Rankin kept saying things like
It was all so long ago
and
Why dredge all that up now?
But eventually it became clear to Pierce that the first mate's widow was afraid of Richard Bruce.

Castleberry flew out to see her. He found a woman down on her luck and depressed. The monthly stipend paid her by the Maritime Widows Pension Fund was not enough to live on; for the past seventeen years she'd been working at a series of petty jobs, each less remunerative than the last as she aged and became less attractive as an employee. Now she was working part-time at a food concession on Venice Fishing Pier and hated it. In other words, she was ripe.

Castleberry quickly caught on that Mrs. Rankin was afraid of losing her pension if her late husband was proved guilty of complicity in the sinking of the
Burly Girl
. Castleberry offered her double her monthly pension payment for the rest of her life if she could come up with some information they could use. Still she hesitated. If she was afraid of someone, Castleberry suggested tactfully, his employer would gladly underwrite her moving expenses if she wished to relocate to another part of the country. She said that for the last few years she'd been thinking of moving to Oregon. He said Oregon was a nice place to live.

Only when Castleberry handed her a contract signed by A. J. Strode himself was she willing to talk. Once she was assured of both her safety and her financial future, she couldn't talk enough. She'd kept it all bottled up for seventeen years, and now it just came pouring out.

Scuttling the
Burly Girl
had been Richard Bruce's idea, Mrs. Rankin said. For his part in the plan, Captain Stone was to receive whatever he could sell the cargo for. But he couldn't manage alone, so he offered to split with his first mate in return for his help. Harry wasn't a bad man, Mrs. Rankin apologized; it was just that things had been going badly for them and they were getting a little desperate for money. She made Castleberry uncomfortable; the woman was pleading with a stranger for understanding, seventeen years after her husband's death.

She'd begged him not to go through with it, she said; but once Captain Stone had approached him, Harry Rankin's fate was sealed. He was afraid to back out; Richard Bruce was a man you didn't cross. So Harry and Captain Stone agreed to divert the real cargo in Yokohama and have crates of junk loaded in its place. They were going to delay sailing until they got the kind of weather they needed to pull it off: bad, but not too bad. Captain Stone showed his mate the place on the charts where Richard Bruce would be waiting with a boat large enough to take aboard the entire thirty-seven-man crew of the
Burly Girl
.

At least that was the plan. But in his last letter to his wife, mailed in Japan, Harry Rankin had expressed doubts that he'd been told the whole story. Over and over he'd asked Captain Stone if he was sure the entire crew would be taken aboard Bruce's boat and not just the two of them. The captain had said yes, yes, they'll all be safe. But his first mate was suspicious; he'd seen his captain lie too many times before not to recognize the signs.

A letter? Castleberry asked, hoping against hope. She wouldn't still happen to have it, would she?

She would. The ink was faded but the writing was perfectly legible. There it was, the incriminating evidence they'd been looking for. Harry Rankin didn't mind a little stealing in a good cause, but leaving thirty-five men behind to die—he'd balked at that. Harry wrote his wife that he planned to stick to Captain Stone like a leech. It was the only thing he could think to do.

Castleberry folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “Is that what you think happened? Bruce took off your husband and the captain but left the others?”

She shook her head. “Even if Harry decided to run out on me, he wouldn't have left me dangling all these years. There would have been a postcard, something. No, my husband's dead, I know that. He never got off that ship.”

Castleberry watched her pinched face and guessed she must be imagining what it was like, those last moments on the
Burly Girl
. “Then what? The captain, er, overpowered your husband and left him behind with the others?”

“I don't see how. Harry was a big, husky man, Mr. Castleberry. Captain Stone was a shrimp. If there was any overpowering done, it would have gone the other way.”

Castleberry understood. “You're saying Richard Bruce left them
all
to drown, Captain Stone included. He didn't show up with the rescue boat.”

She frowned. “They wouldn't have scuttled her without first making sure he was out there waiting for them. There had to be a signal of some sort. The ship sank at night, you know. I think he showed up, flashed a light or sent off a flare or whatever they'd agreed on, and then simply pulled away once he saw the
Burly Girl
going down. Richard Bruce deliberately murdered all those men—just to collect an insurance check.”

Castleberry was as appalled as she sounded. “Does Richard Bruce know about this letter? He'd have paid a lot for it.”

The look she gave him made him wish he hadn't said anything. “Extort money from the man who killed my husband? What kind of person do you think I am?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Rankin. Of course you wouldn't make money off your husband's death, I know that. I just wanted to make sure Richard Bruce doesn't know anything about this letter. He doesn't, does he?”

“No. I thought of taking it to the police. But they'd want me to testify to what Harry told me of the plan … and I was afraid. Any man who'd murder an entire ship's crew wouldn't stop at killing one lone woman. Besides, the pension fund might stop my payments …” She made a vague gesture with one hand.

Castleberry assured her she wouldn't have to worry about money anymore. Over the next few days he got her to sign a statement, arranged with a moving company to transport her household goods to Oregon, and left her with enough cash for a plane ticket. She seemed relieved at having finally told someone, and Castleberry sincerely wished her well.

Back in New York, A. J. Strode had been every bit as appalled as Castleberry when he learned what Richard Bruce had done. He and his assistant agreed immediately that Harry Rankin's letter to his wife should be turned over to the police just as soon as Strode was finished with it. But the letter stayed in the file folder; at the time Strode still had Joanna Gillespie and Jack McKinstry to try, and he didn't want to do anything about Richard Bruce until he was sure of House of Glass.

The man was too dangerous; he had to be utterly conscienceless. In addition to that, Strode's search for House of Glass stock was costing him an arm and a leg. He totted up his expenses so far and added in what he planned to pay for the stock, assuming someone would sell. He compared the total to a projection provided by his analysts as to his profit over a five-year period if House of Glass were eliminated from the competition. When he saw the takeover would pay for itself in a year, he knew he had to go back to California.

It was standard operating procedure for Strode to dig up something reprehensible or at least disreputable from an adversary's past and use it as a cattle prod. But in nearly forty years of doing business, he had never once had to deal with someone who took human life to get what he wanted. He'd dealt with people who killed indirectly—by ignoring safety precautions for their workers, by putting lethal products on the market. Killing a whole town by shutting down the only source of employment in order to get a tax write-off. But that was business; that went with the territory. But actually planning a murder and then carrying it out with one's own two hands … that was something from another world.

But then he'd set his sights on House of Glass and found himself up against not one killer but three. That made even A. J. Strode pause. Could he have dealt with killers before and not known it? But that wasn't the immediate problem; right now he had to concern himself with Joanna Gillespie, Jack McKinstry, and Richard Bruce. Among them they were responsible for the deaths of forty-three people. Gillespie killed her family and McKinstry killed his friends, but for sheer numbers Richard Bruce was the winner hands down.
Hands down
indeed.
All
hands had gone down, in the stormy Hawaiian waters seventeen years ago. Richard Bruce had seen to that.

This was the man they'd come to Los Angeles to meet.

Their appointment was for eleven. When Castleberry arranged for a limo to pick them up, he'd asked for a driver familiar with the port area. Los Angeles harbor covered nearly thirty miles of coastline; everything was well marked, but it was still easy to get lost there. The driver took the Harbor Freeway to the West Basin, where Richard Bruce's office was located.

On the way Castleberry was still trying to talk Strode out of it. “You don't know what else he might have done,” he argued. “One of his competitors conveniently died in an accident, you know. And Bruce is a widower—maybe he killed his wife. And a harbormaster who was giving him trouble simply disappeared. Disappeared! Mr. Strode, you shouldn't even be in the same
city
with this man!” The two bodyguards were listening with interest.

“Aren't you letting your imagination run away with you?” Strode asked testily, not liking Castleberry's uncharacteristically tactless implication that he was no match for Richard Bruce. “Nobody can go around killing whenever he feels like it and
never
get caught. He's not Superman, for god's sake. I don't want to deal with him, but I'm not going in with my eyes closed. I know what I'm up against.”

“Then stay in the car with one of the guards and let me talk to him. Better still, just mail him the envelope. You don't have to see him in person.”

“That's where you're wrong. A man like Bruce won't tamely follow instructions that come in the mail. He's going to have to see for himself that I'm not just making noise for the fun of it. And I want to make this as easy for him as I can. Just another business deal.”

Sure it is
, Castleberry's face said.

Bruce Shipping Lines occupied a five-story building, with the owner's offices on the top floor. An unsmiling secretary ushered them in.

The inner office gleamed with polished wood, even the floor. Richard Bruce was standing at his desk, his back to a wide window that looked out over the harbor. He was leaning over a set of printouts but stood up straight when Strode and company walked in, showing an almost military bearing. Bruce had a composed, expressionless face and a compact body, carrying no extra weight. Not too tall, in his early fifties, black hair with dramatic gray streaks in it. Bruce was a well-tailored man; he wore his obviously expensive suit with ease. The man was downright elegant. Castleberry thought he could have posed for a chamber of commerce advertisement depicting an idealized version of the successful American businessman.

One of Strode's guards stayed outside and closed the office door behind them. The other positioned himself with his back to the door. Bruce noticed the arrangement but made no comment. He fixed his eyes on Strode and waited;
he
was not the one who'd requested this meeting.

“May I sit down?” Strode asked, sitting down. “Thank you.” He'd deliberately placed himself on an inferior level, having to look up to Bruce when he spoke. The message was clear. He was so sure of his position, he didn't have to play that particular upmanship game—which, of course, was an upmanship game itself. “I won't beat around the bush, Mr. Bruce. I want your House of Glass shares.”

Bruce let a beat pass before he answered. “So do I.” His voice was musical and not as deep as might be expected.